Jury: Geoff Cox, Casey Reas, Kate Rich

'Software Art' has become a fashionable term and so caution is recommended. Thus, any statement on ‘software art’ at this juncture must be underwritten by the concern that this might be a further stage of the institutionalisation of a set of emergent practices (and their commodification), unless a critical approach is engaged simultaneously. There is some danger of making fixed definitions here in a way that contradicts the very principles of software as something 'generative; that is always in progress, and on execution produces unpredictable outcomes, that remains in a process of 'becoming' in other words.

To discuss software, its relation to hardware appears fundamental to an understanding of its processes and operations. Perhaps one challenge for software art is to consider whether it is possible to conceive of software without hardware - both in describing a technical relation and a metaphorical one. The three shortlisted works for the software art award all challenge easy distinctions: whether a computer is needed to execute the work (socialfiction’s .walk), how software might be extended beyond itself to satire (Conglomco.org and The Carbon Defense League's Re-code), and to avoid prosecution (Robert Luxemburg's The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice) - all interestingly collaborative and/or anonymously attributed and demonstrating certain ambiguities.

Admittedly partial (and trying to be polemical), our selection aims to reveal these tensions - we do not claim these works to be the best but simply that they offer a point of productive discussion in terms of the festival category definition. We wish for software that has 'use-value', that engages its public, that is ‘write-able’, that reflects the intrinsic contradictory and potentially disruptive qualities of ‘software art’.

Honorable Mentions
Lobende Erwähnungen
Jonah Brucker-Cohen (us)-Bumplist, www.bumplist.net
Margarete Jahrmann/Max Moswitzer (at) - Nybble-Engine-Toolz, www.climax.at
Yunchul Kim (kr/de) - (void)traffic
Radical Software Group feat. Alex Galloway (us) - How To Win “Super Mario Bros.’’
artport.whitney.org/gatepages/artists/galloway/